In the American Educator column of the AFT newsletter, a cognitive psychologists summarizes some surprising research on learning styles:
Question: What does cognitive science tell us about the existence of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners and the best way to teach them?Answer: The idea that people may differ in their ability to learn new material depending on its modality—that is, whether the child hears it, sees it, or touches it—has been tested for over 100 years. And the idea that these differences might prove useful in the classroom has been around for at least 40 years.
What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his best modality doesn’t affect his educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality. In this column, I will describe some of the research on matching modality strength to the modality of instruction. I will also address why the idea of tailoring instruction to a student’s best modality is so enduring—despite substantial evidence that it is wrong.
Emphasis mine. Thus, if a school believes in teaching students mathematics through songs and artwork, it would be nice if they backed this up with research indicating whether these are effective methods of conveying mathematical knowledge.
Because the vast majority of educational content is stored in terms of meaning and does not rely on visual, auditory, or kinesthetic memory, it is not surprising that researchers have found very little support for the idea that offering instruction in a child’s best modality will have a positive effect on his learning...Although it is technically true that the theory hasn’t been (and will never be) disproved, we can say that the possible effects of matching instructional modality to a student’s modality strength have been extensively studied and have yielded no positive evidence. If there was an effect of any consequence, it is extremely likely that we would know it by now.
Read it all.
Posted by kswygert at August 4, 2005 04:46 PM